Data has always been an important asset, but today, it's indispensable. Understanding new consumer attitudes and behavior, and controlling the use of that data – the psychographic insights currently spread across your many systems and platforms – is the key to anchoring your operation as the nexus of community commerce. Your institution, and the communities you serve, will thrive if controlling data is the core of your strategy.

The chief data scientist for a Silicon Valley app developer once told Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor, and author of the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power": "The goal of everything we do is to change people's actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us."

Silicon Valley big tech corporations have outright confessed to the use of data to control consumers, and knowing their prevalent user base, that data is being used to reach the communities you serve. Nascent industries including meal and grocery delivery, all forms of retail shopping and even the physical act of transportation have traded in their old, physical-first, retail world for a chic, digital dimension. Banks and credit unions are not immune to the evolving consumer expectations that these experiences create.